Going behind bars to get the background of a story

Dan Hinkel

Inmates who swear to their innocence are not hard to find, and a newspaper reporter could spend a career interviewing every man and woman who claims to have been wrongly convicted.

James Edwards’ case is different from that of the average inmate. Like several other recent convicts from Lake County, Edwards has more than his own protestations – he also has DNA evidence that appears to call his case into question.

That’s why the Tribune sent me on a 350-mile road trip to Menard Correctional Center outside Chester, Ill. to see Edwards, who was convicted of killing 71-year-old Waukegan appliance store owner Fred Reckling in 1994. He is serving a life sentence for that killing, and he has yet to start serving another life sentence for a murder in Ohio, a crime to which he admitted when he was arrested in the Reckling case.

It has been known since Edwards’ trial that blood found in Reckling’s car and store didn’t match either Edwards or Reckling. Prosecutors have said the blood likely came from a store employee who cut him or herself at work. Experts have said this explanation puts Edwards’ case in league with several others in which Lake County prosecutors have pursued a suspect even after the DNA appeared to point away from that person.

Edwards confessed to the crime, and jurors have said they gave much weight to the confession at trial. Edwards says that confession was coerced by police.

DNA testing on the blood shows that it came from a man Edwards’ defense lawyer says could be the real killer – a former Evanston resident arrested on armed robbery charges on the North Shore of Chicago within weeks of Reckling’s murder, court records show. Edwards believes the ongoing investigation into this man could clear him.

“If this DNA did not come out…in spite of my innocence, I’d be stuck,” he said from behind glass in a cinder block interview room at Menard, an imposing yellow stone maximum-security prison built in 1878 along the Mississippi River.

I asked Edwards, a thrice-convicted murderer with a long criminal record dating back to his youth, how much of his life he had spent in jail cells. He answered that he has been imprisoned in places such as Menard, where the chatter of inmates echoes off metal doors, for half of his 62 years. He has spent more time in prison than I have spent on Earth.

Whatever the findings of the investigation into Edwards’ case, it’s important that people understand the practices and consequences of criminal prosecution. In Illinois, investigators and journalists have uncovered a host of wrongful convictions and false confessions. And just last week, the Troy Davis execution in Georgia illustrated the conflict between those who see the death penalty as necessary and just and those who believe the system is too flawed to be trusted with the power to kill.

Though Illinois no longer executes inmates, the stakes are high. That point was made clear to me as I sat in a cramped interview room behind locked metal doors, with fences and barbed wire waiting outside.